digg

Very interesting find. I digg. Here's a link to the AOL research: http://research.aol.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Research.500kUserQueriesSampledOver3Months

Dugg just to expose some of the blatent security problems with the way we view the internet these days.

More people need to know why not to trust the non-existant "anonymity" of the internet.

And this is why I won't be using AOL any time soon...

Both people who use AOL will be worried.

There is no such thing as anonymity on the internet. All it takes is a little investigating.


But what the heck do I care, AOL sucks and I've never used them :D

Good thing I search for all my gnarly animal porn on google.

RIDICULOUS. RIDICULOUS. RIDICULOUS.

If anyone has successfully downloaded a complete copy of their data file I'd like to know. I can't seem to get the whole thing before the download fails - but I'd be happy to host it as a mirror.

http://multipartysystem.com

And who still uses AOL, again?

I could see accidently searching passwords, this could be danger-esq

its not like anyone who reads digg uses AOL - so who cares.... these people will never know their info was ever released ......

Well that sucks, I'm glad I use Google.

Who wants to bet that the first file viewed is the data classified as 'porn' searches.

i see it kind of logical for some AOL user to search for his own password on google.
seriously, this is really f***** up

I see nothing

Anyone have a mirror/torrent? :D

Google cache: http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:2Qvd2z9VbuIJ:research.aol.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php%3Fn%3DResearch.500kUserQueriesSampledOver3Months+&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1

I'm sure AOL/Netscape has their reasons, and Ted and Jason will blog about it.

Reason #23423972398723 to never use AOL.

The page in the google cache has a link to download the file that still seems to be working.

You know, if AOL gives unique "anonymous IDs" with the searches, it wouldn't be so hard to cross-reference and track some people down with those queries. And then, the information could be used against the person, and it'd all be AOL's fault.

Anyone know how to get a password to download them?

im sorry but porn.dat is hilarious

It's not taken down, you can still download the collection here:
http://research.aol.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Research.Research?action=downloadman&upname=500kusers.tgz

Number one search inquiry on AOL: retirement homes

THIS IS A HOAX - do you really believe they have 500,000 search users? ;-)

Elsewhere on the test samples:

"Frequency: 963
Query: how to masturbate"

We have some AOL accts from a while back (10 years actually) for our staff to use on the road as an easy way to connect. We cancelled every account today. I'm sick and tired of what AOL has become. Time to vote with what hurts them most - money.

It was surprisingly easy to do so once I convinced them there was absolutely nothing they could offer to keep the accounts.

Internet commerce needs to be treated the same as any other kind - vote with your dollars.

5000 cut in jobs, 500000 user searches released in public.

seriously, it would be easier to just call it quits.

Spare a thought for the lawyers! Somewhere in AOL land is a legal team currently in need of a good cardiac surgeon.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/08/06/aol-releases-googles-most-prized-keyword-list-google-is-gonna-get-mega-spammed/

this dude has already figured out some of the potentially valuable free data to be gleamed from the info released.

For those who got a chance to download the data (it was up on reddit.com before it hit the front page of digg, so i got in early), definitely use textpad (http://www.textpad.com/) which processes the 200+ mb files easily. It crashes on notepad though.

Still downloading the collection but here is the README:

500k User Session Collection
----------------------------------------------
This collection is distributed for NON-COMMERCIAL RESEARCH USE ONLY.
Any application of this collection for commercial purposes is STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

Brief description:

This collection consists of ~20M web queries collected from ~650k users over three months.
The data is sorted by anonymous user ID and sequentially arranged.

The goal of this collection is to provide real query log data that is based on real users. It could be used for personalization, query reformulation or other types of search research.

The data set includes {AnonID, Query, QueryTime, ItemRank, ClickURL}.
AnonID - an anonymous user ID number.
Query - the query issued by the user, case shifted with
most punctuation removed.
QueryTime - the time at which the query was submitted for search.
ItemRank - if the user clicked on a search result, the rank of the
item on which they clicked is listed.
ClickURL - if the user clicked on a search result, the domain portion of
the URL in the clicked result is listed.

Each line in the data represents one of two types of events:
1. A query that was NOT followed by the user clicking on a result item.
2. A click through on an item in the result list returned from a query.
In the first case (query only) there is data in only the first three columns/fields -- namely AnonID, Query, and QueryTime (see above).
In the second case (click through), there is data in all five columns. For click through events, the query that preceded the click through is included. Note that if a user clicked on more than one result in the list returned from a single query, there will be TWO lines in the data to represent the two events. Also note that if the user requested the next "page" or results for some query, this appears as a subsequent identical query with a later time stamp.

CAVEAT EMPTOR -- SEXUALLY EXPLICIT DATA! Please be aware that these queries are not filtered to remove any content. Pornography is prevalent on the Web and unfiltered search engine logs contain queries by users who are looking for pornographic material. There are queries in this collection that use SEXUALLY EXPLICIT LANGUAGE. This collection of data is intended for use by mature adults who are not easily offended by the use of pornographic search terms. If you are offended by sexually explicit language you should not read through this data. Also be aware that in some states it may be illegal to expose a minor to this data. Please understand that the data represents REAL WORLD USERS, un-edited and randomly sampled, and that AOL is not the author of this data.

Basic Collection Statistics
Dates:
01 March, 2006 - 31 May, 2006

Normalized queries:
36,389,567 lines of data
21,011,340 instances of new queries (w/ or w/o click-through)
7,887,022 requests for "next page" of results
19,442,629 user click-through events
16,946,938 queries w/o user click-through
10,154,742 unique (normalized) queries
657,426 unique user ID's


Please reference the following publication when using this collection:

G. Pass, A. Chowdhury, C. Torgeson, "A Picture of Search" The First
International Conference on Scalable Information Systems, Hong Kong, June,
2006.

Copyright (2006) AOL

While this may sound bad, and it is technically possible to identify someone through their search engine queries... it seems statistically near impossible to do so. Most people don't spend the majority of their search engine queries searching for themselve or people they are related to.

Can anyone go through and find a identity in the list with such a query collection?

AIM users may want to start looking for a new IM client...

Who knew AOL had 500,000 people searching!

does anyone have a mirror? aol's taken it down.

They've taken it down.
PmWiki can't process your request

?requested file not found

We are sorry for any inconvenience.

A mirror is needed... does one exist?

this is aol's way to get back to the people who cancelled their service.